A Refutation of Positivism The positivists maintain that a sentence is meaningful if and only if it is verifiable. Thus a sentence can be said to be both meaningless and unverifiable. Here is a possible counterexample to that claim: “It’s raining”. This sentence is not meaningless, but it is not […]
The Value of a Life It is natural to think that the value of a life depends on the nature of that life. The value of a life is internal to it. It depends on what happens to the individual, what he or she accomplishes, what he or she is. But […]
The Value of Modal Knowledge As reflective rational beings, we tend to assume that knowledge of necessity has a special kind of value. Think back to when you first discovered that necessarily 2 + 2 = 4: didn’t you experience this discovery as a kind of revelation—as deep, […]
Competence and Performance Multiplied In psycholinguistics it is customary to distinguish competence from performance. [1] Competence is an internal cognitive structure (“knowledge of grammar”) while performance is the outward expression of this knowledge in actual speech. Performance is conceived as the externalization of competence. But this dualism is too simple: we […]
Is the Mind Identical to the Brain? The mind-body problem is usually formulated as a problem about the relationship between mental and physical events, or about mental and physical attributes, or about “mental phenomena” and the brain. Seldom, if ever, is it formulated as a problem about what we call “the mind”, […]
Gricean Belief and Desire Grice argues that speaker meaning is a certain kind of complex intention: the speaker intends to produce in her audience the belief that p by means of the audience’s recognition of that intention—so the act of speaker meaning involves an intention that refers to an intention. [1] I […]
Consciousness and Language If the mind is computational, then there must be a language of thought. This is because computations are operations defined over symbols: thought processes must be symbolic processes. The original conception of a Turing machine makes this very clear, since the operation of writing and erasing marks on […]
Existence and Logical Form There have been two main theories about the logical form of existence statements: the first-order predicate theory and the second-order predicate theory. One theory maintains that “exists” expresses a property that objects have; the other theory maintains that “exists” serves to make a statement about […]
Fixed and Variable Semantic Value The orthodox view is that names are rigid designators and descriptions are (typically anyway) non-rigid designators: denotation varies from world to world in the latter case, but not in the former. What about connotation? The connotation of a description is fixed, even as it […]
The Language of Physics Physics employs four denoting terms to cover what are usually referred to as forces: “gravity”, “electromagnetism”, “the weak force”, and “the strong force”. What is the semantics of these terms? Are they names, descriptions, or demonstratives? Do they function like standard natural kind terms? It is […]